The cool thing about comic books and prose is that if a reader gets confused on page 8, they can backtrack. With films, you sit down in a seat and once the projector starts going you're stuck for the next two hours. There are no do-overs, rewinding or starting again.

I grew up on the East Coast and was going to go to an Ivy League School, but at the last minute I decided to be a hippy. It was the protest movements on the war, peace movements were going on at our university. It was a fantastic time.

Teiresias: Yes well, what is it they say, you're as young as you feel? Kadmos: We must get to the mountain. Should we call a cab? Teiresias: That doesn't sound very Dionysian. Kadmos: Good point. Let's walk.

In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted Christmas toys.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

I feared so-you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist. I'm not sentimental-I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last-the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain...

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.